A Poetics of Public Health

Several times a year, Roy Jacobstein goes overseas. It’s part of his job as clinical
director of EngenderHealth, an international nonprofit organization that works to
make reproductive services safe, available, and sustainable for women and men worldwide.
Most of the time Jacobstein finds himself in developing countries like Malawi, where
in 2003 he was inspired to write “HIV Needs Assessment.”

As Jacobstein remembers it, he’d been in Malawi for about a month, doing an evaluation,
and was sitting in a meeting when his mind began to wander. He began thinking about
the fact that roughly one of every six adults he’d seen in the country was HIV-positive,
and that “everybody’s going to funerals every weekend.” Driving around, he’d observed
billboards advertising coffins as well as toothpaste, and he’d been struck “by the
way that the mundane present and the ambition for the future go on at the same time.”
After he drafted the poem, a Google search led him to the concept of a lightweight
coffin that can be carried by one person.

Jacobstein, 56, began writing poems in his mid-40s, long after receiving his M.D.
and M.P.H. degrees. He’s worked as a pediatrician and for the United States Agency
for International Development, Save the Children, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, and the World Health Organization.

Jacobstein says writing enriches his public health work—particularly the work he does
in other countries—and allows him to put a human face on an often abstract field.
“In public health it’s a little hard to focus on the single individual,” he says,
so he searches for “one small thing to stand for the whole. It’s the human encounter,
the charge and the dynamic of the human encounter that make poetry powerful.”

When he’s not traveling overseas or commuting to New York for his EngenderHealth job,
Jacobstein lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife and five-year-old daughter,
whom he adopted from Cambodia on September 12, 2001. Jacobstein’s first poetry collection,
Ripe (2002), won the Felix Pollak Prize.

"HIV Needs Assessment," reprinted at right, first appeared in the literary journal
Prairie Schooner and won first prize in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology's annual poetry competition.
It appears in Jacobstein's latest book of poetry, A Form of Optimism (University Press of New England, 2006).

Photo: Gideon Mendel, Corbis

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